“... a coarse and cruel tyrant, but the deliverer of his people and the founder of the modern state. Anne Boleyn wasn’t the innocent victim of a monster’s caprice, but a nymphomaniac and serial adulteress who was properly tried and legally executed. Thomas More, the genial philosopher, was not a saint but a sadistic bigot. The real Mary Tudor wasn’t the ...”

“... published on its own by Woolf’s Hogarth Press in 1917 (‘It has the living power, the detached existence of a work of art,’ Woolf reported in her diary). And Woolf got inspiration about rhythm and sound from Mansfield (who was a practising musician and had planned to be a professional cellist before she became a writer), helping her ...”

“... The cut-rate versions of that proper Prince Charlie’s Poundbury, and the cookie-cutter Queen Anne of these new suburban cul-de-sacs are of a piece with the plastic-mullioned fake sash windows and panelled doors now implanted in the Brutalist blocks Hatherley adores, both evidence of the fact that the masses are now privileged with the bad taste of the ...”

“... the most important rescued buildings Tinniswood discusses are Hever Castle in Kent, the home of Anne Boleyn, which was done up by the Astors, and Henry VIII’s Eltham Palace, which acquired a dazzling if slightly incongruous extension in the Moderne style for the Courtaulds. Estate agents were not slow to take note of the historical wow factor and ...”

“... over. The selection was made by John Elderfield and his team – Ann Temkin, Joachim Pissarro and Anne Umland (the first two are newcomers to MoMA).* Elderfield has worked in P&S for years, under the directorships of both William Rubin (1973-88) and Kirk Varnedoe (1988-2000). Yet Elderfield’s final show in the old building, Modern Starts (2000), was cause ...”

“... will believe almost anything else: that Thomas More was a martyr for freedom of conscience, that Anne Boleyn was a witch, and that the monasteries were dissolved by men on horseback who rode in mob-handed and decapitated monks with battle-axes. It is a long time now since triumphalist Protestantism held sway, either in academic or popular belief. Among ...”

“... of ‘the eternal’, art may sign away its epic prestige, surrendering its totalising power to what Lukács would later lament as the ‘kaleidoscopic chaos’ of modern narrative impressionism. Ford’s Hardy combines in this way – if complicatedly – the eternal and the modern. The ‘half a Londoner’ he brings into relief is the young man ...”

“... a round or oval portrait a couple of inches wide. The diminutiveness, of course, is part of its power. A miniature exemplifies the compositional ideal of multum in parvo, a lot in a little: ‘A hand or eye/By Hilliard drawn is worth an history/By a worse painter made,’ John Donne wrote in 1597. By a ‘history’ he means one of those ...”

“... a tenuous similarity of shape) that Scott actually used the tomb as his model. But such is the power of the Soane legend that his inspiration is taken for granted; and the red kiosk is illustrated time and again in studies of Soane, as proud proof of his legacy to modern Britain. Soane’s architecture, no less than ‘Soane the man’, has always provoked ...”

“... was to transform Jews into historical actors: sovereign, legitimate, endowed with a sense of power and agency. But the tendency of Israeli Jews to see themselves as eternal victims, among other habits of the diaspora, has proved stronger than Zionism itself, and Israel’s leaders have found a powerful ideological armour, and source of cohesion, in this ...”

“... the beginning, the index of a mental force unmatched in these early Histories. Richard’s real power surely emanates – as the sinister wooing of Anne will at once make plain – from the symbolic (though of course historical) crookback in itself: from the oddly undeceptive, doggish body that humps and thumps its way ...”

“... violations of fundamental constitutional principles – the unchecked expansion of executive power, the utter disregard for habeas corpus and defendants’ rights in general, the warrantless mass surveillance of millions of citizens and the legitimation of torture as a military tactic. To warriors against terror, the Bill of Rights had become ...”

“... is only by putting it into words that I make it whole; this wholeness means that it has lost its power to hurt me; it gives me, perhaps because by doing so I take away the pain, a great delight to put the severed parts together.’ These diaries encourage one to seek out connections between the ways in which Virginia Woolf found her life, her feelings, her ...”

“... relevant that Berryman, like other self-creating poets, had to invent a persona – that of ‘Anne Bradstreet’, or ‘Henry Pussycat’ – in order to become his real self set down in words. Lowell had no need for that: his self and his persona were both absolute Lowell. Yet he did share with his peers the general characteristics stated by Auden to be ...”

“... to go about their work. Talk must be men’s concern, all of them, and mine especially, for the power in the house is mine.’The anxious young man asserts himself here in a remarkable way. He virtually quotes an earlier hero, and that makes it particularly hard to assess the tone of his speech. In Book 6 of The Iliad Hector told his wife, Andromache, to go ...”